Three ProblemsIn 2009 I met Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and I asked him how he would, if he were in such a position of political power, resolve the recurring conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.He very calmly laid out a plan that he had in fact already sent along to the King of Jordan, a plan for the mass peaceful mobilization of the Palestinian population. His plan mobilized two million protestors and relied on only a small number of critical prerequisites. That Israel would not live-fire on a large crowd of peaceful Palestinian demonstrators, in front of TV cameras, was the most important prerequisite for this plan to work.Palestinians feared then that this prerequisite had not been met, and after the most recent episode of violence on Monday that fear remains built into their thinking. Although Jihadist fighters were among the 58 killed on Monday, Palestinians also buried a dozen of their children and an 8-month old baby.The plan Arun detailed could still work. And I continue to hold out hope for it. It requires wisdom, foresight, empathy, and restraint on all sides. That's what makes it so difficult in a conflict zone where all such things are in short supply.For the plan to work we must confront three concurrent problems, one of them Israeli, one of them Palestinian, and one of them American.In short, the solutions are these: For Palestinians, embrace nonviolent activism, denounce the culture of militant martyrdom, and reform Hamas. For Israelis, denounce Zionist extremism, return stolen lands, acknowledge the Palestinian Right of Return, and return settlements to Palestinian ownership. For Americans, enact sanctions against Israel to pressure the state into taking the above course of action while safeguarding nascent nonviolent movements inside of Palestine. All sides should employ the language of international law and human rights, rather than allowing religious extremism to dictate their actions. If each side speaks in the rational language of laws and morals, they will find sufficient common ground to transcend their religious differences.I make these suggestions freely as a neutral outside observer, and I acknowledge that none of these proposals are popular among hardliners in any state. I have no stake in this conflict, and that leaves me free to speak my mind without preferences for any one particular group or the other. These are the provisions which have the support of the common people in Palestine, in Israel, and in America. More important still, these are the measures necessary for peace. World leaders may dismiss them only if they are willing to accept blame for the ongoing deaths of innocent people.This article is targeted respectively to concerned citizens and officials in Palestine, Israel, and America.

The Palestinian ProblemFirst, for as long as the above reality remains the case, we have to fear that any mass mobilization of Palestinians fighting for their most basic human rights would be met with Israeli gunfire. The more people you mobilize, one can assume, the more people would die. This puts pressure on Palestinians to avoid protesting and in fact avoid politics altogether, because participating in politics as a civilian in Palestine can get you killed.From the viewpoint of a Palestinian nonviolent activist, that situation is already daunting enough. It is hard to mobilize activists when they face the imminent risk of their own death. But in Palestine it’s harder still, because any planned nonviolent action could be (and will be) infiltrated and corrupted by any one of a number of different armed, violent groups. Some of those groups are domestic, some are international, and some are backed by particular foreign powers with precise foreign policy objectives, like Iran. Any one of them all could ruin your nicely planned nonviolent movement. Journalists will be too lazy to trace the origin of those fighters, and will usually make the mistake of assuming that they are a part of your nonviolent organization even when those fighters are not even Palestinian at all.And then there is Hamas, which itself could (and will) jeopardize your movement.While continuing to organize, Palestinian nonviolent activists must denounce militant ideologies loud and clear. To denounce Hamas in Hamas-controlled Gaza is not an easy or simple thing to do, but no nonviolent movement in Palestine can succeed if any militant ideology is stuck to its side. Such a movement must break free of all ideologies, separate itself forcefully from them, and proceed on its own merits to achieve progress for Palestine.But the real trouble is this: For as long as those movements are infiltrated by militants, the foreign media will identify those militants and assume the whole operation is a military one, not a civilian one. They will give Israel a free pass to fire on crowds, and your nicely-organized protestors will all be shot down by a rogue land-gobbling ethno-state whose soldiers don’t frankly care whether you’re armed or not. And for as long as there are even a handful of militant, martyrdom-dreaming men, they will seek to infiltrate any organized nonviolent movement and turn it violent. Palestinian organizers must confront disagreement and disunity within their own Palestinian people, and they must also confront self-serving foreign agents backed by regional powers. They should call out and denounce those agents, even if it risks alienating nearby powers, because no nonviolent revolution can succeed in Palestine if violence hijacks all of its vehicles.Meanwhile, Palestinians must seize the reigns of their own political destiny. They should seek wherever and whenever to avoid the involvement of any paramilitary parties in their nonviolent protests, and, when those parties do infiltrate the protests (and they will), organizers should respond by denouncing militant involvement and publicly reaffirming the nonviolent philosophy of their movement. To sustain the political difference between them, organizers should actively denounce the militant groups which infiltrate their movements, and might even consider cancelling a nonviolent march completely if too many people show up armed. An armed militia could forcibly take command of a planned nonviolent event, and preventing that is the first priority of any nonviolent organizer hoping to achieve sustainable political progress. As we have seen in the past two months, even a dozen armed men can cloud the picture for international journalists, who become less certain about who is to blame and who is at fault with every single additional armed protestor.Hamas, if it intends to remain as a permanent political force in Palestine and the wider Middle East, must take the radical step of normalizing its speech and behavior. Incendiary politics (surprise!) leads to violence. Calm, civil, collected voices shape the future. Palestine has no future if Hamas remains committed to an extremist agenda. Hamas should refrain from relying on religion to validate its actions and opinions. It should seek to validate those actions and opinions through established international law. Hamas will find that the law actually defends the rights of the Palestinian people. Doing this will remove the overtones of violence associated with Hamas, will strip away the religious extremism which separates it from Western empathy, and will reaffirm, in language stronger than ever before, the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people that are being suppressed and erased by its rogue Zionist neighbor, now in a language that the Western world can understand and respond to. And rather than building up the image of a violent martyr, Hamas leaders should consider the appeal of a nonviolent martyr, which, after all, was the actual fate of so many martyrs—that they died in peaceful rebellion, defiant of war.

The Israeli ProblemThe second problem is an Israeli one: The fact that IDF soldiers so willingly commit these crimes suggest that they are doing so within the confines of their own moral worldview. Objectively wrong as it seems to outside observers, to these Israeli soldiers who actually are doing the killing, their actions are justified. This is actually the greater problem of the two. It requires a thoughtful self-reflection on the part of Israel’s own people.As we saw in the previous conflict here, some of these soldiers believe openly in the genocide of all Palestinian—or even all Arab—people. Images from 2014, 2012, and before still stay with us, pictures of signs saying “Kill them All” and crowds of Israeli citizens cheering from the hilltops while they watch rockets destroy Palestinian civilian neighborhoods with a smile on their face, just miles away from their own homes and their own children. To anyone who sees and hears those terrible things, there can be hardly any argument made in defense of Israel’s behavior. And they can spare no optimism regarding Israel’s and Palestine’s future.Other soldiers are more concerned with Israel’s own territorial expansion, and the fact that innocent civilians die, to them, is an insignificant afterthought. Simply an acceptable byproduct of what must occur. Their destiny is the occupation of all of the Biblical Promised Land, and anyone else who happens to already be living there must be forcibly evicted or killed.This kind of thinking is objectively evil and wrong to any third party observer, and for those of us in the West, who rarely see the world through a religious worldview, it’s almost impossible to fathom at all. But the Israelis who participate in these actions—and the Israeli citizens who support this behavior from their soldiers—frankly do not care at all what other people think. They believe that they are God’s people, and that their destiny requires either the oppression or the murder of the Palestinian people as they work to reclaim the land that God promised them thousands of years ago. That is how these people see the world, and before we solve any of these issues we must first take a step back to realize just how sincerely these people believe in that worldview.The extremity of their beliefs, and the fact that they are fundamentally opposed to all the rules of international law and all the norms of international ethics, makes it difficult for foreign diplomacy to play any real role in this conflict. That diplomacy for decades has failed is a testament to that fact. If an outside nation is to change Israel’s behavior, they will need to employ more forcible weapons, including sanctions, the freezing of assets, travel bans, trade embargoes, and the severing of diplomatic ties altogether. The United States must pursue this course of action, and should lead by example for other countries to follow suit.Even so, all the Americans can do is provide incentive for a solution to occur. The Israelis must confront their half of the issue alone, and the Palestinians their half as well. If the Americans do assist in the development and the security of Palestinian nonviolent activism, and if they crack down hard on Israeli religious extremists, then they can lay the groundwork for the Palestinian people and the Israeli people to confront their respective issues at the same time—which is the ideal way forward.Israel must acknowledge that a dramatic portion of their population, both military and civilian, dreams of and pursues the ethnic annihilation of the Arab Palestinian people. They must do more than acknowledge their guilt in crimes against humanity—they must take the larger step of never committing those crimes again. While acknowledging the illegality of their land grabs, they must also pass legislation to return those lands into their rightful Palestinian owners. While acknowledging the illegality of settlements and state-sponsored settlers, they must also return “settled” lands to their original Palestinian status, and recall “settlers” back into the legal borders of Israel. And wherever Israel finds a man or a woman calling for genocide, the state has a moral duty to shame that man or that woman, or even to jail the man or woman if his or her words and actions could actually lead to someone’s death. Those who tolerate genocide share the guilt of those who commit it.When war is the status quo, peace is a revolution. Revolution requires such drastic actions as these listed above on the part of Israelis and Palestinians both.

The American ProblemWar requires mediation. America is an opportune mediator because of the weight and relevancy that it carries, but to succeed in mediation America must first overcome its own issue.That issue is the refusal of the United States to acknowledge the situation that it is already involved with. A point-blank disacknowledgement of even the most basic facts.A minority population within the United States actually shares the militant belief voiced by Israeli extremists, that the whole Levant and biblical Israel belong by “birthright” to the modern Jewish people of this millennium. These individuals believe that all other religions or ethnicities should be cleansed from the region through military invasion, and that all civilians currently living there should be murdered, displaced, or force-converted into Judaism. These individuals believe that biblical Judea should be resurrected as modern Israel, and that modern Israel should be a Jews-only ethnostate.Such people uniformly fail to recognize that their own worldview is even more radical and blasphemous than that of their enemies, usually because they rarely encounter the opposite end of this worldview (that is, the people who hold these beliefs are almost always spared the experiences of actually knowing and caring about refugees and survivors of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and therefore they are never forced to confront their own opinion, or to even recognize that it is a violent opinion in the first place). Within the United States, these people make up a sizeable minority constituent of voters.Ironically, it is often the “Christian” right and other Church-affiliated groups which espouse this most un-Christian ideology. As Arun’s grandfather once told an interviewer, “I love your Christ, but your Christians are so un-Christlike!” These voters attach themselves to Republican platforms and Republicans, consequently, feel obliged to see the world through such an extremist lens.It places American policymakers in a peculiar position. They might have access to the facts. They might know that what Israel is doing is wrong, evil, even sinful. But their electorate thinks the exact opposite. A portion of their electorate even believes in a violent Jewish crusade to reclaim the Holy Land.The solution is for American policymakers to do what they know is the right thing to do. Senators and Representatives, diplomats and staffers and aides, none of them can expect the American people to act with the wisdom and the certainty that we would like them to. They do not have any of the history lessons or the video footage or the in-person interviews that are available to Congresspeople. Congresspeople themselves must lead the American people by example, because they are the only ones who can. Setting aside what their constituents may or may not know, or may or may not think, these elected officials must pursue justice, transparency, accountability, and peace, regardless of American political opinions or religious leanings.Duty is handed gravely to those who have access to the most information and who possess the most worldly understanding of these sensitive affairs. Those people, our Congress and our Department of State, must do what is right even if it flies in the face of what ordinary Americans expect them to do. Not only on behalf of their own country, but also on behalf of the wider world beyond our borders, for the continued security of America, of the Middle East, and of civilization as a whole.Sanctions should be exhaustive and should not only be linked to ongoing violence. They should be tied to prohibitions against illegal settlements, set metrics on the return of stolen lands, and a clear requirement to return back into the folds of international law from which Israel has hidden now for so many years.Modern Israel is a rogue extremist state that pursues a path of its own self-interest in open defiance of our entire world’s most fundamental morals, laws, and basic human rights protections. For almost half a century Israel has refused to abide by international law, and it has done so largely without consequence. No further excuses can be made. It is not just that Israel disavows Western values, it actually breaks the laws and accords agreed upon by the entire world. If the United States stands for any of the values which it pretends to, then it has an obligation, in the name of those values, to face down Israel without blinking.We Americans could wait for Palestinians or Israelis to begin making progress in any of the above points, but there is only time lost in waiting. It is unlikely that either side will be the first to take these risks. We must be the ones to bring about this change. In war, where two sides do not trust each other, it is the third party which can begin the work of peace. America requires bold men and women unafraid of risk and unafraid of change to initiate these revolutions both inside and outside of government. It requires leaders and citizens dedicated objectively and without bias to all our established conventions of international law, human rights, and peace.This is only the most recent of conflicts in a list that already defies finite limits. It will not be the last unless the United States of America stands up and speaks out.

Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement exploded into the headlines, violence by American police officers has come under fire from activists and ordinary citizens alike. Less discussed, however, is how the U.S. government winks at the police brutality of its client states abroad.

The military government in Egypt, for example, is cracking down hard on its restive citizenry — harder than any time in memory. And the United States, which sends the country over a $1 billion a year in security aid, is looking the other way.The cops on the beat in Egyptian cities are a menace. They demand bribes from motorists on any pretense and mete out lethal violence on a whim.

On February 18, a Cairo policeman shot 24-year-old Muhammad Sayed in the head because the youth asked him for a few extra dollars to do the cop a favor. The policeman is facing murder charges. But, as in the United States, it’s common for Egyptian courts to acquit officers or send them away with a slap on the wrist.

Beatings and other abuses are rampant at the country’s police stations.Last month, according to the heroic El-Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, a Cairo-based group, there were eight deaths in police custody — and almost 80 cases of torture. The group estimates that nearly 500 Egyptians died in police custody last year, and over 600 were tortured.Even worse are the plainclothes agents of the Interior Ministry, who operate with near total impunity against perceived political dissidents. When these secret police take people away, Egyptians say they’ve gone “behind the sun.” No one knows where the detainees are, and anyone who looks for them too long will go blind.

Those Interior Ministry goons are the leading suspects in the torture and murder of Giulio Regeni. The Italian graduate student was found dead on a desert roadside, his body bearing cigarette burns and other signs of repeated torture, in early February. He’d been missing for 10 days.

Because he was from Europe, Regeni’s case got a lot of media attention. But it’s grimly ordinary for Egyptians to disappear and die under similar circumstances.

Egyptians don’t take these outrages lying down. Students at the American University in Cairo, where Regeni was a visiting scholar, hung banners in protest. Thousands more surrounded a police station to demand justice for Muhammad Sayed.Most famously, five years ago young protesters chose January 25 — designated by the government as Police Day — to start the enormous popular uprising that forced the octogenarian dictator Hosni Mubarak to step down. For a time after the 2011 revolt, the hated police disappeared from the streets, and neighborhood watches sprang up in towns and villages across Egypt.But as the authoritarian state reasserted itself, so did the most appalling tactics of repression. Police torture, in particular, has become more frequent and more severe. El-Nadeem Center director Aida Seif al-Dawla calls it “a beast that took a break and came back in full force to take revenge.”

This makes it pretty odd timing for the United States to remove all the remaining human rights conditions on the $1.3 billion aid package it sends annually to its cherished ally on the Nile. But that’s exactly what the Obama administration is asking Congress to do.

Secretary of State John Kerry says human rights concerns in Egypt are outweighed by Washington’s “huge interests” there — among them a counterterrorism partnership, a strong state in a region roiled by civil war, the Suez Canal, and Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.​These are the same arguments for “stability” that U.S. administrations of both parties have made for decades. The Egyptian regime gets the message, and so do the Egyptian people: Washington doesn’t care, ultimately, if the police state is unleashed.The United States is in no position to lecture other countries about police brutality. But the Obama administration’s stance toward Egypt effectively condones it.

After fighting the longest war in its history, the United States stands at the brink of defeat in Afghanistan. How can this be possible?

How could the world’s sole superpower have battled continuously for 15 years, deploying 100,000 of its finest troops, sacrificing the lives of 2,200 of those soldiers, spending more than a trillion dollars on its military operations, lavishing a record hundred billion more on “nation-building” and “reconstruction,” helping raise, fund, equip, and train an army of 350,000 Afghan allies, and still not be able to pacify one of the world’s most impoverished nations? So dismal is the prospect for stability in Afghanistan in 2016 that the Obama White House has recently cancelled a planned further withdrawal of its forces and will leave an estimated 10,000 troops in the country indefinitely.

Were you to cut through the Gordian knot of complexity that is the Afghan War, you would find that in the American failure there lies the greatest policy paradox of the century: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped dead in its steel tracks by a pink flower, the opium poppy.

For more than three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into Central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium, and suffered when they failed to complement it. The first U.S. intervention there began in 1979. It succeeded in part because the surrogate war the CIA launched to expel the Soviets from that country coincided with the way its Afghan allies used the country’s swelling drug traffic to sustain their decade-long struggle.On the other hand, in the almost 15 years of continuous combat since the U.S. invasion of 2001, pacification efforts have failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency largely because the U.S. could not control the swelling surplus from the county’s heroin trade. As opium production surged from a minimal 180 tons to a monumental 8,200 in the first five years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan’s soil seemed to have been sown with the dragon’s teeth of ancient Greek myth. Every poppy harvest yielded a new crop of teenaged fighters for the Taliban’s growing guerrilla army.

At each stage in Afghanistan’s tragic, tumultuous history over the past 40 years — the covert war of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s, and the U.S. occupation since 2001 — opium played a surprisingly significant role in shaping the country’s destiny. In one of history’s bitter twists of fate, the way Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with American military technology transformed this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state — a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices, and determine the fate of foreign interventions.

Covert Warfare (1979-1992)The CIA’s secret war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s helped transform the lawless Afghan-Pakistani borderlands into the seedbed for a sustained expansion of the global heroin trade. “In the tribal area,” the State Department would report in 1986, “there is no police force. There are no courts. There is no taxation. No weapon is illegal… Hashish and opium are often on display.” By then, the process had long been underway. Instead of forming its own coalition of resistance leaders, the Agency relied on Pakistan’s crucial Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) and its Afghan clients who soon became principals in the burgeoning cross-border opium traffic.

Not surprisingly, the Agency looked the other way while Afghanistan’s opium production grew unchecked from about 100 tons annually in the 1970s to 2,000 tons by 1991. In 1979 and 1980, just as the CIA effort was beginning to ramp up, a network of heroin laboratories opened along the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. That region soon became the world’s largest heroin producer. By 1984, it supplied a staggering 60 percent of the U.S. market and 80 percent of the European one. Inside Pakistan, the number of heroin addicts went from near zero (yes, zero) in 1979 to 5,000 in 1980 and 1,300,000 by 1985 — a rate of addiction so high the U.N. called it “particularly shocking.”

According to the 1986 State Department report, opium “is an ideal crop in a war-torn country since it requires little capital investment, is fast growing, and is easily transported and traded.” Moreover, Afghanistan’s climate was well suited to this temperate crop, with average yields two to three times higher than in Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle region, the previous capital of the opium trade. As relentless warfare between CIA and Soviet surrogates generated at least three million refugees and disrupted food production, Afghan farmers began to turn to opium “in desperation” since it produced such easy “high profits” which could cover rising food prices. At the same time, resistance elements, according to the State Department, engaged in opium production and trafficking “to provide staples for [the] population under their control and to fund weapons purchases.”

As the mujahedeen resistance gained strength and began to create liberated zones inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, it helped fund its operations by collecting taxes from peasants producing lucrative opium poppies, particularly in the fertile Helmand Valley, once the breadbasket of southern Afghanistan. Caravans carrying CIA arms into that region for the resistance often returned to Pakistan loaded down with opium — sometimes, the New York Timesreported,”with the assent of Pakistani or American intelligence officers who supported the resistance.”

Once the mujahedeen fighters brought the opium across the border, they sold it to Pakistani heroin refiners operating in the country’s North-West Frontier Province, a covert-war zone administered by the CIA’s close ally General Fazle Haq. By 1988, there were an estimated 100 to 200 heroin refineries in the province’s Khyber district alone. Further south in the Koh-i-Soltan district of Baluchistan Province, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s favored Afghan asset, controlled six refineries that processed much of the opium harvest from the Helmand Valley into heroin. Trucks of the Pakistani army’s National Logistics Cell, arriving in these borderlands from the port of Karachi with crates of weaponry from the CIA, left with cargos of heroin for ports and airports where it would be exported to world markets.

In May 1990, as this covert operation was ending, the Washington Post reported that the CIA’s chief asset Hekmatyar was also the rebels’ leading heroin trafficker. American officials, the Post claimed, had long refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by Hekmatyar, as well as Pakistan’s ISI, largely “because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.”

Indeed, Charles Cogan, former director of the CIA’s Afghan operation, later spoke frankly about his Agency’s choices. “Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets,” he told Australian television in 1995. “We didn’t really have the resources or the time to devote to an investigation of the drug trade. I don’t think that we need to apologize for this… There was fallout in term of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.”

The Afghan Civil War and the Rise of the Taliban (1989-2001)Over the longer term, such a “clandestine” intervention (so openly written and bragged about) produced a black hole of geopolitical instability never sealed or healed thereafter.

Lying at the northern reaches of the seasonal monsoon, where rain clouds arrive already squeezed dry, arid Afghanistan never recovered from the unprecedented devastation it suffered in the years of the first American intervention. Other than irrigated areas like the Helmand Valley, the country’s semi-arid highlands were already a fragile ecosystem straining to sustain sizeable populations when war first broke out in 1979. As that war wound down between 1989 and 1992, the Washington-led alliance essentially abandoned the country, failing either to sponsor a peace settlement or finance reconstruction.​Washington simply turned elsewhere as a vicious civil war broke out in a country with 1.5 million dead, three million refugees, a ravaged economy, and a bevy of well-armed warlords primed to fight for power. During the years of vicious civil strife that followed, Afghan farmers raised the only crop that ensured instant profits, the opium poppy. The opium harvest, having multiplied twentyfold to 2,000 tons during the covert-war era of the 1980s, would double during the civil war of the 1990s.In this period of turmoil, opium’s ascent should be seen as a response to the severe damage two decades of warfare had inflicted. With the return of those three million refugees to a war-ravaged land, the opium fields were an employment godsend, since they required nine times as many laborers to cultivate as wheat, the country’s traditional staple. In addition, opium merchants alone were capable of accumulating capital rapidly enough to be able to provide much-needed cash advances to poor poppy farmers that equaled more than half their annual income. That credit would prove critical to the survival of many poor villagers.

In the civil war’s first phase from 1992 to 1994, ruthless local warlords combined arms and opium in a countrywide struggle for power. Determined to install its Pashtun allies in Kabul, the Afghan capital, Pakistan worked through the ISI to deliver arms and funds to its chief client Hekmatyar. By now, he was the nominal prime minister of a fractious coalition whose troops would spend two years shelling and rocketing Kabul in fighting that left the city in ruins and some 50,000 more Afghans dead. When he nonetheless failed to take the capital, Pakistan threw its backing behind a newly arisen Pashtun force, the Taliban, a fundamentalist movement that had emerged from militant Islamic schools.

After seizing Kabul in 1996 and taking control of much of the country, the Taliban regime encouraged local opium cultivation, offering government protection to the export trade and collecting much needed taxes on both the opium produced and the heroin manufactured from it. U.N. opium surveys showed that, during their first three years in power, the Taliban raised the country’s opium crop to 4,600 tons, or 75 percent percent of world production at that moment.

In July 2000, however, as a devastating drought entered its second year and mass starvation spread across Afghanistan, the Taliban government suddenly ordered a ban on all opium cultivation in an apparent appeal for international recognition and aid. A subsequent U.N. crop survey of 10,030 villages found that this prohibition had reduced the harvest by 94 percent to a mere 185 tons.

Three months later, the Taliban sent a delegation headed by its deputy foreign minister, Abdur Rahman Zahid, to U.N. headquarters in New York to barter a continuing drug prohibition for diplomatic recognition. That body instead imposed new sanctions on the regime for protecting Osama bin Laden. The U.S., on the other hand, actually rewarded the Taliban with $43 million in humanitarian aid, even as it seconded U.N. criticism over bin Laden. Announcing this aid in May 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell praised “the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome” and urged the regime to “act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support for terrorism; their violation of internationally recognized human rights standards, especially their treatment of women and girls.”

The War on Terror (2001-2016)After a decade of ignoring Afghanistan, Washington rediscovered the place with a vengeance in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Only weeks later, in October 2001, the U.S. began bombing the country and then launched an “invasion” spearheaded by local warlords. The Taliban regime collapsed, in the words of veteran New York Times reporter R.W. Apple, with a speed “so sudden and so unexpected that government officials and commentators on strategy… are finding it hard to explain.” Although the U.S. air attacks did considerable physical and psychological damage, many other societies have withstood far more massive bombardments without collapsing in this fashion. In retrospect, it seems likely that the opium prohibition had economically eviscerated the Taliban, leaving its theocracy a hollow shell that shattered with the first American bombs.

To an extent not generally appreciated, for the previous two decades Afghanistan had devoted a growing share of its resources — capital, land, water, and labor — to the production of opium and heroin. By the time the Taliban outlawed cultivation, the country had become, agriculturally, little more than an opium monocrop. The drug trade accounted for most of its tax revenues, almost all its export income, and much of its employment. In this context, opium eradication proved to be an act of economic suicide that brought an already weakened society to the brink of collapse. Indeed, a 2001 U.N. survey found that the ban had “resulted in a severe loss of income for an estimated 3.3 million people,” 15 percent of the population, including 80,000 farmers, 480,000 itinerant laborers, and their millions of dependents.

While the U.S. bombing campaign raged throughout October 2001, the CIA spent $70 million “in direct cash outlays on the ground” to mobilize its old coalition of tribal warlords to take down the Taliban, an expenditure President George W. Bush would later hail as one of history’s biggest “bargains.”To capture Kabul and other key cities, the CIA put its money behind the leaders of the Northern Alliance, which the Taliban had never fully defeated. They, in turn, had long dominated the drug traffic in the area of northeastern Afghanistan they controlled in the Taliban years. In the meantime, the CIA also turned to a group of rising Pashtun warlords who had been active as drug smugglers in the southeastern part of the country. As a result, when the Taliban went down, the groundwork had already been laid for the resumption of opium cultivation and the drug trade on a major scale.

Once Kabul and the provincial capitals were taken, the CIA quickly ceded operational control to uniformed allied forces and civilian officials whose inept drug suppression programs in the years to come would, in the end, leave the heroin traffic’s growing profits first to those warlords and, in later years, largely to the Taliban guerrillas. In the first year of U.S. occupation, before that movement had even reconstituted itself, the opium harvest surged to 3,400 tons. In a development without historical precedent, illicit drugs would be responsible for an extraordinary 62 percent percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2003. For the first few years of the U.S. occupation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ”dismissed growing signs that drug money was being funneled to the Taliban,” while the CIA and the U.S. military “turned a blind eye to drug-related activities by prominent warlords.”

In late 2004, after nearly two years in which it showed next to no interest in the subject, outsourcing opium control to its British allies and police training to the Germans, the White House was suddenly confronted with troubling CIA intelligence suggesting that the escalating drug trade was fueling a revival of the Taliban. Backed by President Bush, Secretary of State Powell then urged an aggressive counter-narcotics strategy, including a Vietnam-style aerial defoliation of parts of rural Afghanistan. But U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad resisted this approach, seconded by his local ally Ashraf Ghani, then the country’s finance minister (and now its president), who warned that such an eradication program would mean “widespread impoverishment” in the country without $20 billion in foreign aid to create “genuine alternative livelihood[s].”

As a compromise, Washington came to rely on private contractors like DynCorp to train Afghan manual eradication teams. However, by 2005, according to New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall, that approach had already become “something of a joke.” Two years later, as the Taliban insurgency and opium cultivation both spread in what seemed to be a synergistic fashion, the U.S. Embassy again pressed Kabul to accept the kind of aerial defoliation the U.S. had sponsored in Colombia. President Hamid Karzai refused, leaving this critical problem unresolved.

The U.N.’s Afghanistan Opium Survey 2007 found that the annual harvest was up 24 percent to a record 8,200 tons, which translated into 53 percent of the country’s GDP and 93 percent of the world’s illicit heroin supply. Significantly, the U.N. stated that Taliban guerrillas had “started to extract from the drug economy resources for arms, logistics, and militia pay.” A study for the U.S. Institute of Peace concluded that, by 2008, the movement had 50 heroin labs in its territory and controlled 98 percent of the country’s poppy fields. That year, it reportedly collected $425 million in “taxes” levied on opium traffic, and with every harvest, it gained the necessary funds to recruit a new crop of young fighters from the villages. Each of those prospective guerrillas could count on monthly payments of $300, far above the wages they would have made as agricultural laborers.

In mid-2008, to contain the spreading insurgency, Washington decided to commit 40,000 more American combat troops to the country, raising allied forces to 70,000. Recognizing the crucial role of opium revenues in Taliban recruitment practices, the U.S. Treasury also formed the Afghan Threat Finance Cell and embedded 60 of its analysts in combat units charged with launching strategic strikes against the drug trade.

Using quantitative methods of “social network analysis” and “influence network modeling,” those instant civilian experts would often, according to one veteran analyst, “point to hawala brokers [rural creditors] as critical nodes within an insurgent group’s network,” prompting U.S. combat soldiers to take “kinetic courses of action — quite literally, kicking down the door of the hawala office and shutting down the operation.” Such “highly controversial” acts might “temporarily degrade the financial network of an insurgent group,” but those gains came “at the cost of upsetting an entire village” dependent on the lender for legitimate credit that was the “vast majority of the hawalador’s business.” In this way, once again, support for the Taliban grew.

By 2009, the guerrillas were expanding so rapidly that the new Obama administration opted for a “surge” in U.S. troop strength to 102,000 in a bid to cripple the Taliban. After months of rising troop deployments, President Obama’s new war strategy was officially launched on February 13, 2010, in Marja, a remote market town in Helmand Province. As waves of helicopters descended on its outskirts spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of Marines sprinted through fields of sprouting opium poppies toward the town’s mud-walled compounds. Though their target was the local Taliban guerrillas, the Marines were in fact occupying the capital of the global heroin trade. Forty percent of the world’s illicit opium supply was grown in the surrounding districts and much of that crop was traded in Marja.

A week later, U.S. Commander General Stanley McChrystal choppered into town with Karim Khalili, Afghanistan’s vice president, for the media rollout of a new-look counterinsurgency strategy that, he told reporters, was rock-solid certain to pacify villages like Marja. Only it would never be so because the opium trade would spoil the party. “If they come with tractors,” one Afghan widow announced to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, “they will have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy.” Speaking by satellite telephone from the region’s opium fields, a U.S. Embassy official told me: “You can’t win this war without taking on drug production in Helmand Province.”

Watching these events unfold nearly six years ago, I wrote an essay for TomDispatch warning of a defeat foretold. “So the choice is clear enough,” I said at the time. “We can continue to fertilize this deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome… or we can help renew this ancient, arid land by re-planting the orchards, replenishing the flocks, and rebuilding the farming destroyed in decades of war… until food crops become a viable alternative to opium. To put it simply, so simply that even Washington might understand, we can only pacify a narco-state when it is no longer a narco-state.”

By attacking the guerrillas but ignoring the opium harvest that funded new insurgents every spring, Obama’s surge soon suffered that defeat foretold. As 2012 ended,the Taliban guerrillas had, according to the New York Times, “weathered the biggest push the American-led coalition is going to make against them.” Amid the rapid drawdown of allied forces to meet President Obama’s December 2014 deadline for “ending” U.S. combat operations, reduced air operations allowed the Taliban to launch mass-formation attacks in the north, northeast, and south, killing record numbers of Afghan army troops and police.

At the time, John Sopko, the U.S. special inspector for Afghanistan, offered a telling explanation for the Taliban’s survival. Despite the expenditure of a staggering $7.6 billion on “drug eradication” programs during the previous decade, he concluded that, “by every conceivable metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”

Indeed, the 2013 opium crop covered a record 209,000 hectares, raising the harvest by 50 percent to 5,500 tons. That massive harvest generated some $3 billion in illicit income, of which the Taliban’s tax took an estimated $320 million, well over half its revenues. The U.S. Embassy corroborated this dismal assessment, calling the illicit income “a windfall for the insurgency, which profits from the drug trade at almost every level.”

As the 2014 opium crop was harvested, fresh U.N. figures suggested that the dismal trend only continued, with the areas under cultivation rising to a record 224,000 hectares and production at 6,400 tons remaining near historic highs. In May 2015, having watched this flood of drugs enter the global market as U.S. counter-narcotics spending climbed to $8.4 billion, Sopko tried to translate what was happening into a single all-American image. “Afghanistan,” he said, “has roughly 500,000 acres, or about 780 square miles, devoted to growing opium poppy. That’s equivalent to more than 400,000 U.S. football fields — including the end zones.”

In the fighting season of 2015, the Taliban decisively seized the combat initiative and opium seemed ever more deeply embedded in its operations. The New York Timesreported that the movement’s new leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, was “among the first major Taliban officials to be linked to the drug trade… and later became the Taliban’s main tax collector for the narcotics trade — creating immense profits.” After months of relentless pressure on government forces in three northern provinces, the group’s first major operation under his command was the two-week seizure of the strategic city of Kunduz, which just happened to be located on “the country’s most lucrative drug routes… moving opium from the poppy prolific provinces in the south to Tajikistan… and to Russia and Europe.” Washington felt forced to slam down the brakes on planned further withdrawals of its combat forces.

Amid a rushed evacuation of its regional offices in the threatened northern provinces, the U.N. released a map in October showing that the Taliban had “high” or “extreme” control in more than half the country’s rural districts, including many where they had not previously been a significant presence. Within a month, the Taliban unleashed offensives countrywide that aimed at seizing and holding territory, threatening military bases in northern Faryab Province and encircling entire districts in western Herat.

Not surprisingly, the strongest attacks came in the poppy heartland of Helmand Province, where half the country’s opium crop was then grown and, said the New York Times, “the lucrative opium trade made it crucial to the insurgents’ economic designs.” By mid-December, after overrunning checkpoints, winning back much of the province, and setting government security forces back on their heels, the guerrillas came close to capturing that heart of the heroin trade, Marja, the very site of President Obama’s media-saturated surge rollout in 2010. Had U.S. Special Operations forces and the U.S. Air Force not intervened to relieve “demoralized” Afghan forces, the town and the province would undoubtedly have fallen. By early 2016, 14-plus years after Afghanistan was “liberated” by a U.S. invasion, and in a significant reversal of Obama administration drawdown policies, the U.S. was reportedly dispatching ”hundreds” of new U.S. troops in a mini-surge into Helmand Province to shore up the government’s faltering forces and deny the insurgents the “economic prize” of the world’s most productive poppy fields.

After a disastrous 2015 fighting season that inflicted what U.S. officials have termed “unsustainable” casualties on the Afghan army and what the UN called the “real horror” of record civilian losses, the long, harsh winter that has settled across the country is offering no respite. As cold and snow slowed combat in the countryside, the Taliban shifted operations to the cities, with five massive bombings in Kabul and other key urban areas in the first week of January, followed by a suicide attack on a police complex in the capital that killed 20 officers.

Meanwhile, as the 2015 harvest ended, the country’s opium cultivation, after six years of sustained growth, slipped by 18 percent to 183,000 hectares and the crop yield dropped steeply to 3,300 tons. While U.N. officials attributed much of the decline to drought and the spread of a poppy fungus, conditions that might not continue into 2016, long-term trends are still an unclear mix of positive and negative news. Buried in the mass of data published in the U.N.’s drug reports is one significant statistic: as Afghanistan’s economy grew from years of international aid, opium’s share of GDP dropped steadily from a daunting 63 percent in 2003 to a far more manageable 13 percent in 2014. Even so, the U.N. says, “dependency on the opiate economy at the farmer level in many rural communities is still high.”

At that local level in Helmand Province, “Afghan government officials have also become directly involved in the opium trade,” the New York Times recently reported. In doing so, they expanded “their competition with the Taliban… into a struggle for control of the drug traffic,” while imposing “a tax on farmers practically identical to the one the Taliban uses,” and kicking a portion of their illicit profits “up the chain, all the way to officials in Kabul… ensuring that the local authorities maintain support from higher-ups and keeping the opium growing.”

Simultaneously, a recent U.N. Security Council investigation found that the Taliban has systematically tapped “into the supply chain at each stage of the narcotics trade,” collecting a 10 percent user tax on opium cultivation in Helmand, fighting for control of heroin laboratories, and acting as “the major guarantors for the trafficking of raw opium and heroin out of Afghanistan.” No longer simply taxing the traffic, the Taliban is now so deeply and directly involved that, adds the Times, it “has become difficult to distinguish the group from a dedicated drug cartel.” Whatever the long-term trends might be, for the foreseeable future opium remains deeply entangled with the rural economy, the Taliban insurgency, and government corruption whose sum is the Afghan conundrum.

With ample revenues from past bumper crops, the Taliban will undoubtedly be ready for the new fighting season that will come with the start of spring. As snow melts from the mountain slopes and poppy shoots spring from the soil, there will be, as in the past 40 years, a new crop of teenaged recruits ready to fight for the rebel forces.

Cutting the Afghan Gordian KnotFor most people globally, economic activity, the production and exchange of goods, is the prime point of contact with government, as is manifest in the coins and currency stamped by the state that everyone carries in their pockets. But when a country’s most significant commodity is illegal, then political loyalties naturally shift to the clandestine networks that move that product safely from fields to foreign markets, providing finance, loans, and employment every step of the way. “The narcotics trade poisons the Afghan financial sector and fuels a growing illicit economy,” John Sopko explains. “This, in turn, undermines the Afghan state’s legitimacy by stoking corruption, nourishing criminal networks, and providing significant financial support to the Taliban and other insurgent groups.”

After 15 years of continuous warfare in Afghanistan, Washington is faced with the same choice it had five years ago when Obama’s generals heli-lifted those Marines into Marja to start its surge. Just as it has been over the past decade and a half, the U.S. can remain trapped in the same endless cycle, fighting each new crop of village warriors who annually seem to spring fully armed from that country’s poppy fields. At this point, history tells us one thing: in this land sown with dragon’s teeth, there will be a new crop of guerrillas this year, next year, and the year after that.

Even in troubled Afghanistan, however, there are alternatives whose sum could potentially slice through this Gordian knot of a policy problem. As a first and fundamental step, maybe it’s time to stop talking about the next sets of boots on the ground and for President Obama to complete his planned troop withdrawal.​Next, investing even a small portion of all that misspent military funding in rural Afghanistan could produce economic alternatives for the millions of farmers who depend upon the opium crop for employment. Such money could help rebuild that land’s ruined orchards, ravaged flocks, wasted seed stocks, and wrecked snowmelt irrigation systems that, before these decades of war, sustained a diverse agriculture. If the international community can continue to nudge the country’s dependence on illicit opium down from the current 13 percent of GDP through such sustained rural development, then perhaps Afghanistan will cease to be the planet’s leading narco-state and just maybe that annual cycle can at long last be broken.

At least four hospitals and a school were hit in airstrikes yesterday in Syria.

In Maarat al-Numan, in Idlib Governorate, two hospitals were attacked, including one supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF). The MSF hospital was reportedly hit by four missiles, which allegedly killed nine people and injured 30 others. The National Hospital in Maarat al-Numan was also hit with three people reported killed and six injured.

A mother-and-child hospital in the town of Azaz, some 30 kilometres from Aleppo, was also struck yesterday, with 13 people killed and dozens injured. The facility, which is supported by the UN, had been previously struck on 25 December 2015. A second hospital in the town, the General Hospital, was also struck with seven killed and 23 injured. Both hospitals are well-known facilities.

Also in Azaz, a school that was sheltering internally displaced people (IDP), was hit in yesterday’s strikes, reportedly killing 14 people.

We are gravely concerned about these abhorrent and repeated attacks on medical facilities in the Syrian conflict.

While it is not yet clear whether these facilities were intentionally targeted, the sheer number of incidents raises huge question marks about the failure of the parties to the conflict to respect the special protections afforded to medical facilities and personnel under international humanitarian law.

Customary international humanitarian law affords special protection to hospitals, medical units and healthcare personnel, and Article 3, common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 – which is binding on all parties to the conflict in Syria -- requires the wounded and sick be collected and cared for.

Depending on the circumstances, an airstrike on a hospital may constitute a war crime. Intentionally directing attacks against hospitals and places containing the sick and the wounded and against medical units using the Red Cross or Red Crescent emblem is a war crime, in a non-international armed conflict.

Attacks on hospitals and other medical facilities in Syria began as far back as the beginning of 2012. A 13 September 2015 report by the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, entitled “Assault on medical care in Syria” listed an appalling litany of attacks on hospitals and medical units over the past four years as well as numerous examples of the sick and wounded being deliberately denied medical assistance, primarily by Government forces and pro-Government militias.The report also cited what it termed “one of the most insidious trends of the armed violence in Syria” -- namely the targeting of healthcare personnel, with ambulance drivers, nurses, doctors and medical volunteers attacked, arrested, unlawfully detained, and disappeared.

The escalation of the conflict in and around Aleppo is of grave concern, with civilians continuing to suffer the consequences. Air and ground strikes by different parties – including airstrikes conducted by Syrian and Russian planes, as well as ground operations by Syrian Government forces and their allies, and by armed opposition groups – have led to the destruction of essential civilian infrastructure such as medical facilities and bakeries, rendering life even more difficult for civilians in many towns and villages across the governorate.

As of yesterday, 58,000 IDPs were at the Syrian/Turkish border, many of them in camps, with the figures increasing daily. Several villages in the northern rural part of the governorate are reported to be almost empty due to people fleeing over the last week. The population of Aleppo is in dire need of an immediate ceasefire and unhindered humanitarian assistance. Without it, the tens of thousands of civilians remaining in towns and villages across the governorate will be left vulnerable to aerial attacks, mass killings, and destruction of the remaining infrastructure and will be deprived of badly-needed assistance.

Rachel Schor - World Report News - Feb. 14, 2016 -The Syrian civil war and the conflict that preceded it have led to a complete collapse of the Syrian economy, severe unrest in neighboring countries and the wider Middle East as a whole, hundreds of thousands of lost lives, and nearly twelve million displaced persons or refugees. The conflict began in March of 2011 after a peaceful protest led by Syrian citizens who wanted reform in their government. They were specifically protesting their lack of freedom and the corrupt leadership of Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria, whose resignation soon became a condition of their protests. Assad responded as his father did before him and crushed the protests with lethal military force. In 2012, The International Committee of the Red Cross officially declared the unrest in Syria a civil war. Assad inherited the presidency in 2000, when his father Hafez al-Assad passed away. He initially gave the Syrian people a great amount of hope; the young, Western-educated, successful doctor, with the charming Syrian-British wife who could change the corrupt way that his father had once led the country, was a symbol of a new era. His first years were marked with an increase in international trade and a strengthening of the Syrian economy. By 2011 Assad's momentum had waned, and his government had fallen back into corruption and gridlock. On April 25th, 2011, several thousand Syrians gathered in Deraa, a city that had hosted protests since March, to protest against the Assad regime. This was just one of many peaceful protests that had been hosted in Deraa over the past few weeks. They had been calling for a major upheaval of their corrupt government and for its leader, Bashar al-Assad, to step down from office. What made this date notable was that instead of ignoring the protestors as the government and its army had previously been doing, they responded with violence. They shot automatic weapons into the crowd and brought in military personnel whose job it was to silence the protestors. Al Jazeera reported that at least fifty protestors were shot down and killed. This was unfortunately only the beginning. In response, the protests expanded across the entire country. In Deraa and other cities, over 25,000 protestors peacefully expressed their disapproval of their government, Damascus, the capital city, included. Protestors began calling "With our soul and with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for Deraa," "Down with the regime," and "We stand with Deraa." Since that day in 2011, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has declared that over 6.5 million Syrians are considered to be refugees, that over 10.8 million people in the region will be hurt by the conflict, and that only about 26,000 of these people have been “targeted for assistance.” These numbers grow daily. Citizens that are targeted for assistance are the people that the UNHCR has committed to financially supporting through various means as they try to find a new place to live. That is only about 0.2% of the predicted number of people who will be hurt by the conflict. Besides the tragic loss of life and the equally as devastating mass displacement of Syrian citizens, the economic burden of these past four years will be felt by generations of Syrians and middle easterners more broadly for years to come. It is not just Syrians who are facing the onus. The UNHCR has had to more than triple its financial support to Syria, increasing from $116.8 million USD in 2011 to an estimated $362.5 million USD by the end of 2015. While UNHCR Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) projects are gaining funding, the refugee programs are quickly losing it. In 2010, the refugee program budget in Syria was well over $150 million USD. It is now barely over $50 million USD. As an increasing number of people become refugees, an even larger group of people are becoming IDPs. What this means for refugees is that unless they choose to stay in Syria (which they most likely will not), the chances of them getting aid or assistance from the UNHCR is significantly lower now than it previously was. While the UNHCR is spending a great deal of money, the Syrian economy is certainly bearing the biggest portion of the cost of this war. A Harvard Center for International Development study estimated that “large government-involved civil wars typically reduce the gross domestic product (GDP) by 1.25 percent each year.” In 2013, Syria’s economy did not just drop the estimated 1.25 percent. Instead it dropped 20.6 percent. In 2014, the Syrian government was so broken that no data was available for an updated figure. The same was true for 2015. The World Bank published a report saying that a primary cause of this striking decline in funds is a sharp decline in oil production, down from 368,000 barrels per day in 2010 to about 40,000 in 2015. This decrease in production certainly had an effect on the rest of the world and their demand for oil. According to a graphic put together by information organization Info Mine, crude oil prices rose to over $100 starting right at the time that the crisis did, and has stayed that high or higher until August of last year when it slowly began to lower. Aside from collapsing infrastructure and economy, the Syrian Civil War has given birth to one of the most dramatic human refugee crises since the Second World War. Many people have argued against their own governments allowing these refugees into their nations for a variety of reasons, the most popular being that they will take natives’ jobs, that it is too expensive, and that terrorists will sneak in with the refugees. The most popular complaint against accepting more refugees, that it is just too expensive, has recently been proven incorrect by a World Bank study. After evaluating the GDPs of the nations bordering Syria, (Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan) the report stated that all three countries have experienced about three percent growth since they began accepting refugees. While these nations have accepted more refugees, they have also received an increasing amount of financial aid from other nations. The cost of dealing with refugees is quite high, but a “recent study carried out under the auspices of the UN concluded that the refugee-aid packages alone actually boosted Lebanon’s GDP by more than one percent.” This said, the same report has claimed that on the other side of the coin, the crisis in Syria and the spillover of the economic down turn there has lowered Lebanon’s GDP by about .3 percent. So while refugee aid can be a boon to national economies, the countries that are located in the immediate area of conflict still suffer detrimental results. The second most common reason why nations do not want to accept more Syrian refugees is because they supposedly take all the open jobs away from natives. This should sound all too familiar, as the same rhetoric is used in the United States when talking about immigrants from Mexico. The Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies conducted a study on this and found that Syrian refugees actually were benefitting the economies of neighboring nations in this way as well, as they were taking the jobs that natives were actively choosing not to apply for, creating a more productive and powerful work force. The third reason is that of the two major jihadist attacks against Western targets tied to Syrians (Paris and San Bernardino, CA). Only in one of the cases (Paris) did one single assailant have a falsified refugee passport. No attack inside America has been conducted by a Syrian refugee. “Since 2012 the European Union has received about 1.9 million requests for asylum, and even that number is dwarfed by the number of people who have sought refuge in countries adjacent to Syria. According to the United Nations, Turkey has taken in an estimated 2.2 million, Lebanon 1.1 million, and Jordan six hundred and thirty thousand.” According to the UNHCR, over 50 percent of the Syrian population is currently internally displaced. Creating support systems for those people to find their way back to their homes once it is safe to do so will be a tedious and expensive task. But as much press as the refugee crisis has received, it remains true that for every Syrian refugee abroad, approximately three Syrians remain displaced inside of Syria, and their plights are often the worst of all. They continue to struggle with war, homelessness, personal loss, and famine, and addressing their needs in the long term will be as important as handling the refugee crisis. The United Nations expects that it will take at least thirty years for the Syrian economy to return to its prewar prosperity. "The scale of the economic destruction in Syria is reminiscent of some nations after WWII," suggested Jihad Yazigi, editor of The Syria Report. "It could take 40 to 50 years to recover." For too many victims and refugees, that means recovery will not happen in their lifetimes- unless other countries commit to helping.

Matthew R. Bishop - World Report News - January 13th 2016

The Structure of Fear

This past December, CNN hosted a televised debate for Republican presidential candidates that focused heavily on the issue of Islamic terrorism. The hosts prodded the candidates on questions like how will keep us safe from terrorism, and what will you do about the Islamic State. The debate was held on the pretense that Islamic terrorism inside the United States is one of our most pressing national concerns. This is a pretense that has been built up over the years for self-serving interests mostly on the part of our country's politicians and mass media professionals. It is not the result of an honest or evidence-based assessment of the challenges this country faces. Instead of investing in real solutions and having hard talks with America’s allies that would make significant advancements in combating foreign terrorism, and instead of giving the voters the simple quantitative evidence to show that we actually have far more important things to discuss than terrorism in the first place, politicians continuously orbit around terrorism and the Islamic State in particular- all for the purpose of scaring the electorate into voting for them. They dismiss the possibility of tackling more serious problems like gang violence or gun policies because talking about terrorism is easier, dramatically less controversial, and gets them more votes. Instead of criticizing this state of affairs, media networks and journalists fan the flames of fear in order to get more clicks, longer view times, and higher advertising rates. While the theoretical duty of our media involves prioritizing the challenges this country faces and devoting coverage accordingly, in practice anything "Islamic" has a tendency to receive undue attention and be wildly exaggerated on the scale of threats. Sometimes this is intentional, for the career and organizational advancements of individuals and media companies. Often, however, it is a mindless, knee-jerk reaction to an illogical fear.

War and Terrorism in Numbers

More people are killed as the result of gang-related violence every single day (on average) in the U.S. than were killed in all of 2015 by acts of Islamic terrorism inside our borders. The same has been true for every single year except for 2001. In fact, every year since 2001, more individuals inside these borders have been killed by pigs (actual pigs, the ones we get bacon from) than by terrorists. If we look at homicide more generally (excluding gang-related incidents) we see an even larger threat compared to which terrorism is not even a visible concern. In America, one school shooting occurs roughly every four school days during the school year. And yet while each of these concerns is factually more viable, "terrorism" is a more powerful word in our national dialogue. The specter of terrorism (and Islamist terrorism, specifically) elicits more fearful and dramatic responses, more powerful emotions, and, accordingly, is the basis for many over-reactive policies and practices.

Yes, terrorism is real. But even in the nations that do fall victim to terrorism, there are often far more serious problems to be addressed. Let's use Syria as an example. In Syria, almost 400,000 people have been killed by war- not by terrorism. Almost twelve million people have lost their homes because of war- not because of terrorism. So how is a news channel justified, or a politician, when they decide to take on the issue of terrorism in Syria instead of war? Such a decision does not respect the reality that war victims must endure. Consider that in 2015, for every single civilian that the Islamic State killed, Assad's national forces killed ninety-six. That's a 96:1 murder ratio. The fact of it is that while Assad's forces bomb, shell, and massacre huge numbers of real civilians who actually do need our help, our politicians and media pundits are stuck talking about a small number of delusional jihadists living in the desert who dream of taking over the world. Here in America, meanwhile, you are far more likely to be killed in your child's school than in a terrorist attack, and you are roughly one hundred times more likely to be killed in a gang fight. You are even more likely to be killed by your own livestock, and that accounts for the fact that not even 5% of the American population raise livestock in the first place.

So why do we keep hearing about terrorism, of all things? Fear sell. Fear gets peoples' attention, money, and confidence. The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the irrational sense of fear that it instills in the victim. Our nation still suffers under the ghost of 9/11. Today in our country that fear itself is a billion-dollar industry. The Islamic State in particular has served as the recent embodiment of this fear, the manifestation of the enemy we all must be afraid of and against which we all must stand united. It's a message that sells. Journalists and politicians have fostered in the American people a widespread fear of this small, marginalized, and disorderly radical movement based in a rural stretch of desert half the world away. They have done this through wild and often purposeful exaggeration. Throughout this process, each individual involved assures him or herself that the threat must be real. If it was being exaggerated on all sides, surely someone would be there to correct that exaggeration. In psychology, this mentality is called Diffusion of Responsibility, and it permits every individual to behave less responsibly in a group than he or she would alone. They do so because each assumes that someone will do the right and responsible thing, and that it doesn't all fall on their own shoulders to make the harder choice. But everyone assumes as much, so no one does anything about it. As a result the hype goes on and grows to take on a life of its own, until our country is filled to the brim with people who have been scared mad by their own politicians and reporters. Part of it is personal. The Islamic State captures American journalists partially for publicity and partially as negotiating leverage. Their colleagues back in the States respond with outrage. It gets the Islamic State on television and helps them broadcast their message. In too many ways the Islamic State is using the American media for its own purposes, and the American media responds with overwhelming content coverage of the Islamic State. That doesn't change the reality for the civilian who suffers the daily terrors of war in Syria. That person is still ninety-six times more likely to be killed by his or her own government forces than by an Islamic State fighter. And yet Americans across the board seem more concerned with and more fearful of the Islamic State. It was only last month when President Obama waved his hand and made a comment about how the Islamic State doesn't have the power to threaten the survival of the American nation. It was a dismissive answer to a ridiculous question. The Islamic State, after all, counts its fighters to be around 30,000, whereas the United States has the most advanced military system on earth. Still so many people have come to believe in the severity of the threat that his dismissive response prompted national outrage and days of ongoing coverage. The real terror of terrorism is that it has primed us not only to respond to enemies as any sovereign would, but, in our madness, to conjure up entirely new ones. The Islamic State is only the latest manifestation of this need to find new enemies and be afraid of them. The greatest irony is that this drive to find new threats has itself created new threats and in doing so has endangered our security and our standing around the globe.

Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S. military, Iraq had never once in its history suffered one single suicide bombing attack. Since the U.S. invasion in October of that year, there have been at least 1,892 recorded cases of suicide bombings in Iraq. In Pakistan, there had only been one single suicide bombing in the fourteen years prior to 9/11. In the fourteen years since 9/11, Pakistan has witnessed 486 suicide attacks. Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Nigeria have each suffered between 85-165 suicide attacks in the fourteen-year period following 9/11. These attacks are often conceived of by the assailants as a retaliation against American imperialism. Since 9/11 the perceived imprint of American imperialism has grown in the eyes of these organizations to the point where violence around the world is a real concern. Yet the actual targets of the attacks almost universally have nothing to do with the political aims of the terrorist group. The attack itself is a message the group sends to politicians, a message which warns that civilians are not safe, constituents not protected, unless the demands of the terrorist group are met. The fact of it is that even while these terrorist groups claim to be fighting against American imperialism, the people they're killing are their own countrymen, fellow Muslims who usually don't involve themselves with the deadly politics about which the terrorists are concerned. The threat is not in America. The threat is abroad, in the countries mentioned above, the countries that have witnessed terrible spikes in violence since 2001. The expansion of unfriendly U.S. policies and the history of American imperialism in these countries paved the way for terrorist organizations in these countries, but those organizations are not attacking Americans, regardless of what they say on TV. The truth is that they are killing their own neighbors and fellow countrymen. So if our politicians and our media professionals want to have a real discussion about how to address terrorism, let them ask the real questions. Let them ask how to work with politicians in conflict-ridden nations who must balance international interests with a constituency that is as wide as it can get, the politician who actually has to answer both to the businessman who works daily with Americans and to the separatists, terrorists, and other extremists who believe American interests must be met with lethal force. Those politicians are in fragile situations. If we find ways for them to bridge the divides between the people they must answer to, then we can make progress against terrorism. We are not going to do it here in America, because that is not where terrorism is located. And breaking into hysteria about a small group of rebels who call themselves the Islamic State is not going to open up new solutions for the countries where terrorism is a real, life-threatening problem. These changes need to occur at the policy level, but far more importantly they need to happen in full view of the public, in our news, our TV, and among our politicians while they debate each other.

The Changes We Can Make

U.S. military interventions in these and other countries have radicalized groups and individuals who previously did not identify themselves as enemies of the United States. The military and foreign policies of our country have contributed in major ways to the rapid destabilization of nation-states across the Middle East and the Maghreb. From Hussein to Gaddafi, the leaders we have toppled have left behind them chaos and war. It is beyond question that our foreign and military policies are in need of revision. But there are meaningful avenues of change outside of executive-level national government. When CNN began covering the Islamic State, that coverage was marred with sensationalism. Analysts and reporters became glued to the subject. The public loved it- across all the political spectrum. Within weeks of when CNN began covering the Islamic State, their recruitment numbers doubled and then tripled quickly thereafter. Before being picked up by the mass media, this organization relied mostly on face-to-face recruitment and a series of low-profile jihadist Twitter accounts. Today, IS relies on CNN and FOX to broadcast its message globally through far more substantial means than the group itself can afford or provide. It would be irresponsible for journalists to ignore violence, crime, and murder when it occurs. It is still more irresponsible for journalists to sensationalize those crimes to the point were the issue of terrorism dwarfs, against all evidence, more serious global and national security concerns. Fear, not terrorism, has drained our national budget, skewed our priorities in Congress, damaged our alliances around the globe, and, worst of all, it has given rise to a misinformed bloc of Americans who, despite their lack of knowledge regarding world affairs, believe that they know enough to take vocal positions and advocate for violence on a massive, terrifying, and totally unwarranted global scale. It is the shared responsibility of politicians, media professionals, and engaged citizens to put things in perspective for the American people and bring down this scare.

Refugees and Reality

Today Americans are in debate over whether to allow in ten thousand impoverished, homeless Syrian refugees who very obviously do not present a credible threat to American security. Such xenophobia is neither rational, nor logical, nor in line with American values, nor in line with legal immigration practices and American jurisprudence. In any other context it might be unimaginable that such a debate is even taking place. Only in this context of irrational paranoia can this hateful reaction against civilian refugees be explained. Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan together have taken in a total of four million refugees. The European Union has received another two million requests for resettlement. Canada has pledged to settle a minimum of fifty thousand in 2016. The United States, pledging to resettle the lowest number by far of any of these nations, is in an uproar over the matter. We are facing a catastrophe that has displaced twelve million people- for scale, that is the same as the number of individuals killed in the Holocaust. There is no solid moral ground on which this debate should even be taking place. Of the twelve million people the civil war in Syria has displaced, approximately four million are refugees and eight million internally displaced persons (IDPs). From within these masses, one refugee participated in the Paris attacks, and zero participated in the attack in San Bernardino, California. That is all the correlation between recent attacks and the refugee crisis. One person out of approximately twelve million.

There are places in the world where being killed by a radical Islamic terrorist is a real, credible threat. America is not one of those places. Fear has been used in this country as an instrument for profits, for votes, and for the individual career goals of powerful people. It has polluted what would be an honest discussion involving real answers to real problems, to the point where we are not reacting to reality- we are only reacting to our own imaginary fears. Our Congress tried to block a measly ten thousand refugees- nevermind one or two million. It is the responsibility of every educated person to step forward and put an end to this irresponsible national behavior and to remind the American people of the facts. Gangs are more dangerous. Cars and planes are more dangerous. Roads are more dangerous. Your children's schools are more dangerous. Domesticated pigs are more dangerous! These, again, are not political opinions. They are simple, quantitative facts.

There is this imaginary correlation in the American mind between refugees and terrorists. It's a lie that stems from the misconception that terrorism is the gravest danger our nation and our world faces today. If by grave we mean the number of people killed, then factually terrorism is not one of the gravest dangers we face in this country or in this world. It is nowhere near one of the most serious global concerns. Terrorism accounts only for about one-fiftieth of one percent (0.02%) of all violent murders per year. For every five thousand people murdered, only one of those murders will be due to terrorism. (Compare these two sources for data: Deaths by Terrorism and Total Violent Deaths) To rewrite legislation or deny civilian refugees a home in this country because of hype and fear is irresponsible, inexcusable, and inconsiderate of the evidence we have.

Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams - Oct. 14 2015 - Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) on Wednesday are waiting for a response from the U.S. and Afghanistan to approve a formal investigation into the bombing of its charity hospital earlier this month.

MSF announced that a formal request has been made to the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission (IHFFC) to investigate the U.S. military airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan, marking the first time the Commission has been activated since its inception in 1991 under the Geneva Conventions.

"The IHFFC stands ready to undertake an investigation but can only do so based on the consent of the concerned State or States," the commission wrote in a statement Wednesday.

It is unclear if the U.S. or Afghanistan will give permission for the investigation to move forward. MSF has consistently said it cannot rely on internal investigations by the U.S. Department of Defense, Afghan officials, or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which are currently underway, and previously called on both governments to allow for an independent probe of the October 3 bombing that killed 22 people, including patients and staff.

President Barack Obama made a formal apology to the medical charity and the Pentagon has said it plans to give "condolence payments" to victims' families, but MSF international president Dr. Joanne Liu has maintained that the organization's biggest priority is an impartial inquiry into the airstrike.

"We have received apologies and condolences, but this is not enough. We are still in the dark about why a well-known hospital full of patients and medical staff was repeatedly bombarded for more than an hour," Liu said Wednesday. "We need to understand what happened and why."​"We need to know if the rules of war have changed, not just for Kunduz, but for the safety of our teams working in frontline hospitals all over the world," Liu said.

Originally Published by Insight on Conflict on September 7th, 2015 - Like many, the image of a young lifeless Syrian boy has been etched into my memory. The way he was lying in the sand, I thought he resembled a sleeping child. In the alternate universe where my mind sometimes operates, I found myself imagining him on his father’s chest, rather than the cold sand of that Turkish beach.

His image took me back to the children I had met while visiting towns on the Turkish-Syrian border just a few weeks before. I thought of a boy no more than 12 years old who had lost a quarter of his skull to air strikes in Aleppo. Despite the obvious violence he had endured, he smiled genuinely and was excited to practice his English, given the amount of time he had been out of school. Would his family attempt the same perilous journey that had drowned that poor child? Would he still smile, years from now, if his life remained paralysed by conflict?

I have been pressing myself to consider how we can do better. As a global community, how can we work to improve the welfare of children worldwide? Most of the recent discourse on this topic has centered on immigration reform and policies that can accommodate refugees in an immediate sense. I fully support these discussions but I also advocate for more strategic planning and policies that give attention to both short and long-term goals.

Paramount to the welfare of children is providing safe haven from harm. Yet the needs of children who have experienced violent conflict and displacement do not end there. Many require services to help them mitigate the effects of violence, offer them safe spaces to heal, and give them skills and hope for the future.

To accomplish this, organisations like the United Nations and international NGOs offer “education in emergencies”, which provide children with vital care during and in the aftermath of conflict. Education provided during a crisis can be a pivotal factor in helping children to cope with recent events, while giving them essential skills for the future.

During a crisis, a school can provide stability for a child. Medical services can often be accessed, school meals become a guaranteed food source and teachers and trained personnel gain the opportunity to address psychological damage.

Beyond its importance as a form of humanitarian aid, education also provides a road to long-term development and recovery. Through education, children can choose productive life paths rather than feeling pressure to join armed groups. They gain skills and credentials necessary to move forward. In these instances, education is key to breaking cycles of conflict and offering hope for the future.

But providing this care for children is only a marginal consideration of the international community. Presently, less than 2% of all humanitarian aid funding is designated to education in emergencies. Given the fact that refugees remain in ‘temporary’ settlements for an average of 17 years, this means an entire generation of children could be lost.

In Syria, many have already been out of school for over four years. These children are being deprived of a future and left to remedy the impact of conflict on their own. Increasingly, desperate parents are attempting life-threatening journeys to find safety and promise for their kids.

To truly help children affected by conflict, both safe havens and long-term care is required. Nations of the world need to simultaneously review immigration policies while also committing immediate support to a global fund for education in emergencies. This moment needs to be meaningful. We need to do better.

By Alya Radhi, via Waging Nonviolence - On June 16, my husband Sheikh Ali Salman was sentenced to four years in prison for publicly inciting hatred, disturbing public peace and inciting civil disobedience of the law in Bahrain. His lawyers issued several statements in which they complained that the court prevented them from making an argument. The ruling received wide international condemnation.As the secretary general of al-Wefaq, the largest political party in Bahrain, Sheikh Ali is a prominent and influential political leader. He took his first steps on the path of nonviolent struggle for freedom and equality 20 years ago. Ever since, he has maintained a firm vision that a democratic transition can be achieved in Bahrain through a peaceful movement.His strong belief in tolerance and pluralism can be seen in the speeches he gave during the popular protests that erupted on February 14, 2011. “We’re in no need for Molotov cocktails or stones, but we need courage to continue in our peaceful and nonviolent activism,” he said in a famous speech before his arrest in 2014. “Our slogan is nonviolence, even if we’re imprisoned or killed. One day, the global conscience will move and we will be victorious by God’s will.”Since 2011, Bahrain has been rocked by nationwide demonstrations demanding major political change in a state that has seen a single prime minister since its independence from British colonialism in 1971. At least seven men were killed, as the regime carried out multiple attempts to crush the protests centered at Pearl Roundabout, the historic monument in the capital city Manama.In March 2011, the regime finally called in foreign troops from neighboring states, which led to the deadliest and most brutal crackdown in Bahrain’s modern history. The gigantic protest was shattered and the Pearl monument was demolished.Following international pressure and criticism, Bahrain called in an independent commission of inquiry, which released a damning report that documented extrajudicial killings and deaths resulting from torture in police custody. But this did not lead to any easing of the regime’s iron fist on the popular movement, which is still ongoing. International reports continue to document arbitrary arrests and harsh court rulings by what Human Rights Watch described as “a system of injustice.”Sheikh Ali is being prosecuted for his open disapproval of the exclusion of citizens based on ethnic and sectarian grounds, and for his harsh criticism of the autocratic rule under which Bahraini citizens are deprived of the right to democratically choose their government.His case is part of a larger crisis that has rocked this country over the past four years. Who is paying the price? Without doubt, it is the people, who must bear arrest, detention, exile, layoffs from their jobs, repression and the loss of loved ones. Sheikh Ali’s case is a people’s cause and tells the story of a nation’s struggle for legitimate demands.The Court of Appeals is to review his sentence on September 15. Will the Bahraini government move closer to political agreement with the opposition? The release of Sheikh Ali Salman could be a start. The court’s decision will be an indicator on where Bahrain will be heading in the coming years. ​More than 200 days after his arrest, the people of Bahrain who have taken bullets with bare chests remain committed to the peaceful movement for democracy, freedom and equality. This nation deserves attention and support from the international community and international rights organizations for its legitimate demands by working to reach an agreed-upon political solution. It is not in Bahrain’s interest — nor would it be good for the region — for the four-year-old turbulent situation in the country to continue.My husband, Sheikh Ali Salman, is facing a politically-motivated trial for his patriotic stance and his criticism of the state’s suppression of the people. Most importantly, however, he is the key to any consensus, dialogue and negotiation to reach a resolution in Bahrain. I therefore remind the international community of its responsibility to press for his immediate release and to have his charges dismissed.